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DISPATCH
By Laura Kasinof
There was also the issue of language. South Sudan is a diverse country,
with some 60 languages spoken by dozens of ethnic groups in a
population of around 13 million. The majority of South Sudanese also
speak what is known as Juba Arabic, a dialect far removed from
standardized Arabic and named for the South Sudanese capital. But
Arabic was also the language of the Sudanese government in Khartoum,
which the South Sudanese viewed as their longtime colonizer.
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Seven years later, the hope of a new nation—one that was initially
cheered by the United States and Europe—is hanging on by a thread.
South Sudan has been engaged in a brutal civil war that displaced a
third of the country’s population and killed tens of thousands. A
September peace deal between President Salva Kiir and rebel leader
Riek Machar offers a hint of optimism, but whether peace will hold is
another more troublesome issue altogether. South Sudan’s conflict
often breaks down along ethnic lines, as infighting among elites has
polarized South Sudan’s diverse population. And despite all of the
government’s ambitious linguistic plans, English remains the language
of a minority, and indigenous languages have become more politicized
than ever.
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Left: Nuer students in the Protection of Civilians Camp 3 write in their native language, which is not taught in schools outside the camps, in Juba, South
Sudan, on March 23. Right: Students sit in class at a school where teachers struggle to teach in English, rather than in Arabic or their local languages, in
Juba on March 21. (Alex Potter for Foreign Policy)
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Girls write on the blackboard during English class in their high school in Juba, South Sudan, on March 21. The school’s mandate is to primarily teach in
English, but teachers admit to struggling to stick to the curriculum without any Arabic. (Alex Potter for Foreign Policy)
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When hostilities broke out in Juba in December 2013, marking the start
of South Sudan’s civil war, government soldiers reportedly spoke to
civilians in the Dinka language to distinguish those who belonged to
the pro-government Dinka ethnic group from those who belong to the
Nuer, that of opposition leader Riek Machar, whom the army targeted
during the fighting. (Dinka and Nuer people tend to share a similar
physical appearance, but Nuer living in the capital often cannot speak
Dinka.)
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Bakhita Ireneo, an education student at Juba University, struggles with the English curriculum after studying in Arabic her whole life.
(Alex Potter for Foreign Policy)
“We speak Nuer, but not in front of people. We have to hide our
identities,” a law student told me when we spoke inside a tent that
served as a tea shop for the displaced. He asked to remain anonymous
due to political sensitivities.
On the other side of the camp, inside a school for displaced children, a
teacher taught Nuer language to an overfilled classroom. Children of
various ages dutifully wrote Nuer sentences in an adapted Latin script
into their notebooks. The head of Nuer language education at the
school, Lam Deng, insisted that teaching Nuer wasn’t a political act.
“This has nothing to do with the conflict,” he said, but that surely is not
how it is seen from the outside.
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unifying force did not destroy the country, but it is one among many
failures. The new deal between Kiir and Machar could renew a sense of
common national identity in the coming months, or old divisions could
spark a return to civil war.
The country, once hailed by world leaders such as U.S. President Barack
Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, has fallen into an
identity crisis, flip-flopping on the foundational question of where and
to whom it belongs. In the end, its failure as a modern-day state-
building project has shown that while selecting and adopting the right
official language may not be able to make or break a new nation, it can
certainly hasten its success or collapse.
Laura Kasinof is a journalist and author of Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets: An Accidental War
Correspondent in Yemen. She was the New York Times correspondent in Yemen during the Arab Spring.
Twitter: @kasinof
READ MORE ON AFRICA | CHINA | FRANCE | INDIA | INDONESIA | NATIONALISM | SOUTH SUDAN |
SUDAN | TANZANIA | TURKEY | UNITED STATES | WAR
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